The invention relates to a hollow profile.
In vehicle construction a vehicle body is produced by using, inter alia, longitudinal beams and transverse beams which have to be interconnected and have to have a sufficient stiffness to ensure sufficient vehicle safety in the event of accidents such as frontal or lateral crashes. For this purpose, insert parts are used that are integrated in the beams and serve for connecting further components, so called attachment parts, such as subframes.
For connecting an attachment part to a vehicle body longitudinal beam having a multi-chamber profile, it is known to use a sleeve with a shaft section and a sleeve head. For this the shaft section is guided through the entire cross section, including the chamber-forming partition walls of the multi-chamber profile, from a first outer sidewall to the opposing second outer sidewall of the multi-chamber profile, until the sleeve head abuts the first outer sidewall or optionally the shaft end perforates the second outer sidewall. Such a sleeve can then be welded to the longitudinal beam in the region of the sleeve head and the shaft end where it forms respective connection points for the attachment parts. A disadvantage hereby is that the profile structure of such a multi-chamber profile is damaged, which disadvantageously changes the deformation behavior in the event of a crash.
The generic patent document EP 0 841 240 A2 proposes as solution a hollow profile with two or more chambers into which a sleeve is inserted so as to only traverse an outer chamber or so that at least one chamber remains free. Hereby the sleeve is supported in the interior of the hollow profile on a partition wall between two chambers while not, or only insignificantly, protruding into the neighboring chamber, wherein the sleeve is connected without clearance to the partition wall and the outer boundary wall of the hollow profile via a material-to-material-connection or frictional connection. For connecting the sleeve to the partition wall, the partition wall has a through-opening into which the end of the sleeve is inserted. Due to the through-opening, this solution thus also involves weakening of the partition wall so that also in such a hollow profile the deformation behavior is changed.